A Survey Of Avoidance Phenomenon In English Writing Of Non-English Major Students

Avoidance is a strategy that the learners employ to avoid using a difficult word or structure, but use a simpler word or structure instead, when they speak or write a second or foreign language. The typical types of avoidance are topic avoidance, syntactic avoidance, phonetic avoidance and vocabulary avoidance. Avoidance phenomenon is an important psychological phenomenon in the process of learning foreign language.Essentially, avoidance is actually a communication strategy, and appropriate use of avoidance strategy will keep communication straight, gain more comprehensible input; while over use of it will have negative effect on the learning foreign language or might cause interlanguage fossilization. Therefore, avoidance phenomenon is an important branch of foreign language research.The research mainly based on the communicative strategy theory put forward by Faerch and Kasper and the classificatication of avoidance strategy stated by Brown. The research of avoidance phenomenon in English writing of the non-English major students will have more inspirations for the college English writing instruction.The research depends on the three instruments:English writing, questionnaire and interview. The participants are one hundred sophomores from Shenyang Normal University. They will be divided into three groups:the higher group, intermediate group and lower group. The data are from the experiment, and then will be analyzed by SPSS.The significance of the research lies in:1) to study the avoidance strategy of the non-English majors when they encounter difficulties in English writing; 2) to give some suggestions for college English writing instruction.